Search Results for: budget

Is a Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice?

June 20, 2022 By MelissaB 1 Comment

When our kids were young, my husband and I struggled financially. My husband was getting his Ph.D. and worked as a graduate assistant. I had just quit my full-time job because the cost of daycare in Chicago for two kids under two plus after-school care for our oldest would cost me as much as I was taking home each week. We survived for three years like this until my husband graduated and started working a regular job and a side hustle. I also worked a part-time job from home. Now that we’re 10 years removed from that situation, we recently discussed if a side hustle is worth the family sacrifice.

Some Times You Have No Choice

I want to acknowledge that sometimes, you have no choice. Sometimes you have to work as much as you can to cover rent, buy groceries, and care for your family. For my husband and I, the first few years after he graduated were like this. We were in debt because we had lived off his graduate assistantship and student loans those last three years, and we needed side hustles to try to get out of the hole we were in. However, we should have set a limit for how long we would work our side hustles.

Dave Ramsey’s Influence

Fifteen years ago, I loved listening to Dave Ramsey, and I bought into the idea that we should “live like no one else so later we can live like no one else.” I accepted the sacrifice that side hustles required because I was sure that if we worked hard, we’d end up on the other side, able to check off the baby steps.

Is A Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice?

We are now at the point where we’ve completed baby steps 1, 2, and are on baby step 3. However, we’re also at the point where our kids are now 18, 13.5, and 12. We lost a lot of our kids’ lives to side hustles.

Is a side hustle worth the family sacrifice? As a parent with older children, I can answer for us, it was not worth it.

What We Sacrificed for the Side Hustle

Side hustles have a dark side that most people don’t talk about. For us, these were the major drawbacks:

We Were Exhausted

After my husband got home from his regular job and side hustle, I would start my work after being with the kids all day. I would often work until midnight and get up at 5 or 6 a.m. That was not enough sleep.

My husband and I were both exhausted all the time.

We Were Grouchy

Because we were working so hard and exhausted, we were also grouchy. Raising young children can be challenging under the best circumstances, but when you’re exhausted and grouchy, it’s not good for anyone.

Final Thoughts

Is a side hustle worth the family sacrifice? For us, the answer was no. Rather than following Dave Ramsey’s advice to hustle until you’re completely out of debt, we should have set a limited time frame for our side hustle. We hustled for far too long, and I’m sorry we missed out on some opportunities to spend enjoyable time with our kids when they were little because of that.

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8 Tips to Stop Food Waste

May 23, 2022 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

Nearly every month, the cost of groceries seems to rise. What can you do? You need to feed your family, but the current high price of groceries is straining most families’ budgets, especially when combined with the high cost of other necessities such as gas and housing. For most families, the cost of food is the second-highest expense behind housing. (In our family, if I’m not careful, the cost of food is higher than our monthly housing costs.) While you may try to coupon or buy food when it’s at its lowest sale price, another way to save is to utilize these tips to stop food waste.

How Much Food Do Americans Waste?

According to Earth.com, the average American family “waste[s] nearly one third of the food they buy.” However, if they utilized strategies to eliminate food waste, “a family of four could save $2,000.”

If you haven’t made a conscious effort to stop food waste, now is the time.

8 Tips to Stop Food Waste

Years ago, my husband and I wasted quite a bit of food. Every week, we would have anywhere from three to six containers of leftover food that we would have to throw out. We would also sometimes waste fruits and vegetables. Now, we no longer do that; we rarely waste any food.

We used these eight tips to stop wasting food:

Don’t Eat Out Frequently

One reason we wasted so much food years ago was that we ate out three to five times a week. When you eat out that frequently, you don’t have the opportunity to eat the leftovers you already have or the ingredients you bought to make meals.

Not eating out dramatically reduced our food waste.

Make Meals You Enjoy

This seems silly to say, but make meals that you enjoy eating. I used to make casseroles because I liked making only one item for a meal that had the protein, carbs, and veggies my family needed. However, none of us liked casseroles, especially not leftover. The leftovers frequently went in the garbage.

Now, I make meals we enjoy, and they’re not wasted.

Freeze the Leftovers

We have two deep freezers, and I utilize them extensively to avoid food waste.

Freeze Leftover Meals

Sometimes I make a recipe that is supposed to serve eight, but there are enough servings for 12. We eat the meal once, and then we eat the meal leftover once later in the week.

By then, my family is tired of eating this meal, so if it freezes well, I freeze the last four servings. Then, about six to 12 weeks later, I pull it from the freezer and serve it to my family. They don’t complain because it’s been weeks since we last had that meal. I don’t complain because I get a night off from cooking, and I didn’t have to buy food at the grocery store for that meal that week.

Freeze Leftover Ingredients

You can also eliminate food waste by freezing leftover ingredients. For instance, I only use tomato paste for a beef stew recipe I have. Once I use one tablespoon, I have about two-thirds of the can left. Rather than just tossing it, I put the tomato paste in ice cube containers and freeze it. Each ice cube size of tomato paste is about one tablespoon. Now, the next four times I make beef stew, I don’t have to use a new jar of tomato paste; instead, I use one of my leftover ice cubes of tomato paste. Sure, I am only saving a little, but when I do this for many food items, the savings add up.

Create a New Meal Out of Leftovers

Luckily, my family doesn’t mind eating leftovers. If your family does, you can avoid food waste by making new meals out of the excess.

For instance, let’s save you have a pork roast for a meal and have leftover shredded pork. You could serve it just like you did the first time. Or, you could mix it with barbeque sauce and make pulled pork sandwiches. If you still had leftovers, you could use them later in the week for pork carnitas. Your family probably won’t complain about eating leftovers this way because you’ve made three different meals with the meat.

Don’t Buy More Than You Need

Don’t buy more than you need sounds simple but can be difficult. Rather than planning six meals you’ll make from scratch this week, only buy ingredients for four meals. You can serve leftovers for the other meals or make meals from what you already have on hand.

Buy Frozen Fruits and Vegetables

If you routinely have to throw away produce because it goes bad before you can cook it, consider switching from fresh to frozen. Fresh strawberries may go bad within a few days, but frozen strawberries last for months in the freezer.

We usually buy fresh fruits and veggies, but we also have several bags of frozen that we use to supplement our fresh vegetables. Frozen veggies give you more flexibility because you don’t have to use them within a few days.

Have a Pantry Challenge

We’ve all bought ingredients for a recipe, but then something comes up and we can’t make that recipe. Meanwhile, the ingredients sit on our pantry shelves. One way to avoid having miscellaneous items fill your pantry shelves is to have a pantry challenge. For one to four weeks, buy the bare minimum groceries and focus on using up the ingredients that you have on hand.

Not only is this a great way to reduce food waste because you’re using what you already have, but it’s also a good way to save money.

Final Thoughts

If you’re struggling with the high cost of food, use these 8 tips to stop food waste. Learning to not waste food could save your family thousands of dollars a year.

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How to Simplify Your Financial Life

March 31, 2022 By Justin Weinger Leave a Comment

Most likely, no one ever says they wish they could make their finances more complicated. People talk about organizing their finances or paying off debt, but at the bottom of all of that, most really want one thing: a simple financial life. The tips below can help you do that, allowing you to worry less and save more.

Know What You’re Working With

What is going out? What is coming in? These are the first two questions you have to answer, looking at the money that you’re getting and the money that you’re spending. You might not even know if you are living within your means or not. To start with, you just have to answer one simple question, which is whether you’re spending more than you are making. If you keep running out of money before the next paycheck or charging up your credit cards, the answer is yes. Whatever the case, your next step should be to make a budget. You can start out by keeping a record of all of your spending for a few months or getting an app that will do it for you. This will help you understand exactly where your money is going.

Reduce Your Spending

Unless you are already extremely frugal, if you are like most people, the budget experiment will probably reveal ways that you can spend less. This doesn’t mean cutting out every pleasure in your life. Budgeting is not about finding new ways to deprive yourself but means that you can look at where you might be wasting money without realizing it and where you can save.

Ultimately, it should give you freedom since you’ll know exactly how much you can spend in various categories that you designate. Some of those places where you can cut back may be obvious. You may see that you could indulge in a little less retail therapy or start bringing your lunch instead of eating out every day. There may be other, less obvious steps you can take as well to free up extra savings. You could refinance any existing student loans into a new loan with lower monthly payments and interest rate. Once you have freed up some cash, the next step is figuring out what to do with it.

Set and Achieve Financial Goals

There are a few financial goals that are important for everyone: getting out of debt, building emergency savings, and saving for retirement. These should all be prioritized, with an eye to making things as easy as possible. If you have a retirement plan at work, your deductions can be automatic. You can also have savings diverted into a separate account by the bank when your money is deposited.

Organize your debts either lowest to highest amount, or highest to lowest interest rate, and pay the same amount each month, focusing on the first debt and paying the minimum on others. As each debt is eventually paid off, roll your payments to the next one on the list. This is an easy, consistent system to follow. You can pay your credit card down faster with this approach. Once these basics are taken care of, look to other goals, such as saving to buy a home.